Know your consumer inside and out, says Arvind Iyer, Piramal Finance
For the head of marketing at Piramal Finance, KYC is not a formality to be gone through but something that gives an understanding of the customer’s way of thinking.
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Arvind Iyer is a man with eclectic tastes, absorbing lessons from management gurus to musicians. As the head of marketing at Piramal Finance, Iyers hopes that his team gleans some of his learnings. In a conversation with Storyboard18, he emphasised the importance of getting to know the customer well enough to deepen their understanding about key cohorts.
“If your business environment permits, then you should try and do that with first-hand lived experiences. Which means going out and being with the customer, trying to understand their life more than just them as consumers or as a cohort,” he said during the interaction.
Edited excerpts:
What are some of your favourite quotes on marketing and leadership?
I'll start with a new-age marketing guru, Seth Godin, who says, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.” That's so true for brands that are being built today. One old quote that I really like from British advertising tycoon David Ogilvy is, “Big ideas are usually simple ideas.”
Then there is the Chinese philosopher and writer Lao Tzu, who said—and this one I really identify with—“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
And one of my personal favourites is the late Canadian musician Neil Peart, the lyricist and drummer of the rock band Rush. He wrote this line in one of their songs called Vital Signs from the album Moving Pictures. It says “Courageous convictions will drag the dream into existence.”
In your free time, what kind of marketing-related content do you consume?
We definitely keep our eyes and ears to the ground to see what is going on right now. So there's (sales, marketing and customer service company) HubSpot, (blogger) Neil Patel on SEO, and the tool Semrush (the SaaS platform offered by Boston-based Semrush Holdings) itself.
We have a subscription to Semrush and it's quite endearing to just play around with it to see what's happening from a keyword trend standpoint and to see what people are searching.
Then, there is something called Sprout Social, a social media management tool. Online publishing platform Medium has some good resources like Outgrow (a B2B tech company), etc.
What I really liked was the whole ‘Overpowered' series featuring entrepreneur Varun Mayya and YouTuber and comedian Tanmay Bhat. It's good to see what's happening in that space and then learn something new from there.
Where do you get your social media fix from?
We use a custom social listening tool for all things, especially Meta and YouTube. So, we curate through a social listening tool and some manual effort from each one of us. It gives you overall a trend that is not really marketing but about what's happening in and around you. So that comes in super handy.
What were the last five videos you viewed on any social platform?
I watched (Marathi song) ‘Taambdi Chaamdi’ by DJ Kratex and Indian rapper Shreyas, and ‘Sapne Dekhna Achchi Baat Hai’.
This was followed by The LloydAndMatt Show on Dad Jokes, and Lot of Easter Eggs by Vir Bhaan Saini.
Who are your favourite creators and what draws you to them?
On business marketing and culture, there are quite a few but I want to name a couple of them. One is the podcast series WTF by Nikhil Kamath. I also do look at Backslash (the cultural intelligence unit of advertising agency TBWA) to see how they map and navigate culture to try and see how we can use some of the tools or the techniques that they use. I think what they put out on Instagram is actually really good.
Another one is a business podcast called ‘How I Built This’ by American journalist Guy Raz. He talks about a whole different bunch of brands and companies in terms of how they built it. So that's again an interesting long-format show but good to hear and listen into.
On the entertainment side, there is really quite a bit. I've been recently watching a lot of content by Dr Pal Manickam (an American board-certified gastroenterologist). He is somebody who talks on gut health in a very entertaining manner.
There's this Instagram handle called Analog Society where they do music mashups and put out these little clips. The television programme ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’ is another thing that I try and follow as much as I can.
And when the brain needs to switch to completely random things, then something like a 9GAG (online platform and social media website) for sure.
What is your sports or fitness routine like?
I am not into extreme sports and fitness routines but I definitely do jogging, lift weights and yoga once a week.
How does your routine weekend go? What does your favourite kind of weekend look like?
I like spending time with my family. As and when I do make the time, I hit the stage because I'm a moonlighting musician too.
What have you been watching on weekends?
I barely get time. But when I do, I kind of like seeing things that have a little depth. So I've been a lot into Malayalam movies these days, and I have been meaning to catch ‘Kishkindha Kaandam’ which is running in theatres.
Generally, for the repeat fix, I tend to oscillate between Yes Minister, The Office, Boston Legal, Friends, etc.
In fact, the latest musical documentary I watched was called ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’. It's with Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
Any work or life hack you swear by?
The whole aspect of ‘Stay Humble and stay Foolish’ I think has worked for me. You are managing a team who does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I think just being able to bestow the trust on the people and sort of helping them stay over when it's absolutely needed is the biggest thing one could do. And while doing that, I think learning is super important.
What are you reading? Any recommendations?
I am reading two to three books. The first one is a very interesting book by American author Cal Newport called ‘Deep Work’. It's about saying how do you kind of sit down and focus in a highly distracted world.
The second one that I finished recently is ‘Lilliput Land’ by Rama Bijapurkar. This is one of those books where when you read, you've got to kind of take notes.
What I am currently reading is the ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield.
What's your advice to avoid personal and professional burnout?
What I can think of is you need to work for someone or rather your manager or the environment around you where someone is invariably brutally honest with you and in a way that is trying to make you a better version of yourself.
A piece of professional wisdom you would like to share with next-gen marketers?
It's actually one piece, but it's split into four. Because it's marketers, I'd say there are broadly four components. You always start with a KYC, which is ‘knowing your consumer’ inside out, and one needs to develop chops in understanding all the key cohorts. If your business environment permits, then you should try and do that with first-hand lived experiences. Which means going out and being with the customer, trying to understand their life more than just seeing them as consumers or as a cohort.
Secondly, I love new-age digital marketing and AI. It's so much of an open canvas. We do a lot of that at Piramal Finance, and the beauty of this is, there is an innate ability to be able to read things almost instantly.
Thirdly, I'd say to sort of rely on good old marketing management theories like STP, 4Ps, Hofstede onion, and implicit models of segmentation. Going back to (author and consultant) Philip Kotler and (management guru) Peter Drucker never hurts. Invest in first-hand experience in developing them irrespective of what role you have. Whatever exposure you can get is good for you because you can just land up absorbing and if you do work in a place where someone is trying to get you to be a better version of yourself, then you should be able to ask questions and seek answers to some of the things that people have been dabbling with for years already.
There is a nice saying by American composer and economist W. Edwards Deming: In God we trust; all others must bring data. A lot of people in many teams would say that they're not very comfortable having the acumen to interpret data in an analytical form.
But I think just being able to develop some sense of seeing where numbers are, how to navigate and not needing to remember every single factor out there is super important to be able to get that perspective.
Because it gives you a glimpse of how your business is doing and to be able to marry that with brand and consumer and market kind of just triangulates all of them together.
What's the best advice you have got or heard on life?
Interestingly, it's from my father and that's something I practise quite a bit. He once told me that the key quality essential for seeing progress is your willingness to embrace change. Since we live in the world of constant flux, being able to embrace change and being able to develop more native abilities towards it is, I think, the best advice I have received. It's personally been very beneficial for me and I try to follow that for all my team members and all my peers as much as possible.
